Irish cultural nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries attempted to create new images of Irish culture that would counter English stereotypes and serve Irish nationalist purposes. The translation record -including the absence of translation - of Táin Bó Cúailnge, the centerpiece of Ireland's heritage of medieval heroic literature, illustrates the impact of ideology on translation and the ways in which translation serves cultural agendas. In English translations the adaptation of the Ulster Cycle to a biographical framework, representing Cú Chulainn as an ideal of militant Irish heroism, and the focus on the Fer Diad episode of Táin Bó Cúailnge, in which violence toward one's friend and brother becomes a necessary price of fulfilling group loyalties, together set a trajectory leading to Easter 1916, as well as later violence in the North.